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- The Rise of Anti-AI AI Slop
Americans are wary of AI in general, and they are especially suspicious of the AI data centers that are popping up across the country like enormous mushrooms. A majority do not want a new data center built in their town. Across the country, community groups have organized to protest individual projects, and activists have successfully lobbied local and state politicians to place moratoriums on the facilities’ construction. But online, the movement has been mutated by some of the same forces it’s protesting. Defenders of the AI industry have claimed that the social-media conversation about the dangers of AI is inauthentic—that, in fact, it’s AI-generated—and to some extent, they’re right. There is a lot of anti-AI AI slop. Much of it is very strange.[Read: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]Last week, I perused dozens of local anti-data-center groups on Facebook, and in almost every one, I found people sharing AI-generated materials. Even in these groups, users posted screenshots of AI-generated summaries as backup for their arguments. In the comments under a post about data centers in Texas, a woman shared her concern about the fact that data centers use human stem cells. When someone called her a 🤡, she replied with a screenshot of a Google AI summary for the search Do data centers use stem cells. One Australian start-up is experimenting with the idea, but the AI summary made the practice sound widespread: “Yes, pioneering facilities are starting to utilize living human neurons grown from stem cells as biological processors,” it said. The same week, a town supervisor on Long Island had to debunk a rumor about a new data-center project after an inaccurate AI-generated search summary attracted so much attention that residents planned a protest (which they promoted with a flyer that itself appeared to be AI-generated).A weirder, more disturbing type of AI-generated anti-AI content started proliferating on Facebook in March. The memes, which show broadly nostalgic images of the American countryside, are shared on state-themed pages with names such as “Life in Michigan” and “North Carolina Life.” In one repeating format, someone has mowed a spiky message into their grass or crops: “NOT WORTH GIVING UP AN INCH OF THIS TO A DATA CENTER,” for instance. (Sometimes they also mow a middle finger.) Another meme shows a boxy new industrial building—presumably a data center—right next door to a beautiful old farmhouse.An accompanying caption will generally… [TheTopNews] Read More.7 days ago - America Has a Pangram ProblemBasically every recent, high-profile accusation of someone passing off AI-generated writing as their own has started in the same way: with a tool called Pangram. In March, when a horror novel from a major publishing house was pulled just days before its scheduled U.S. release date, it was in part because Pangram, an AI-detection program, had identified the text as AI-generated. Other people have fed text into Pangram to suggest that chatbots have been used to write articles in major newspapers including The New York Times, multiple short stories awarded a prestigious literary prize, and most recently, significant chunks of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical warning about the dangers of AI. The tool is also used by universities to vet student work and scientific associations to scan research papers. As panic builds over AI-generated writing, Pangram is at the foundation.Just a few years ago, it seemed like it might never be possible to instantly and reliably determine whether a piece of text was written by a bot or a person. In 2023, one detection tool, ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written; the same year, OpenAI abandoned its AI detector altogether owing to a “low rate of accuracy.” And that was when the quality of ChatGPT’s writing was markedly worse than it is today. But detection tools have gotten much better of late—and Pangram, in particular, has emerged as the gold standard: Paste a chunk of text into Pangram, and the model appraises what portions were “AI Generated,” “AI Assisted,” or “Human Written.”Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.[Read: AI-writing scandals are getting very confusing]Pangram says its algorithm is so accurate that it incorrectly identifies text as an AI output only about one in every 10,000 times. “There is a great responsibility, a huge weight” in saying something is AI-generated, Max Spero, Pangram’s CEO, told me. “The only reason we do so is because we’re extremely confident.” Several independent analyses have also confirmed that it is quite good. One paper, from the University of Chicago, found that Pangram had almost no false positives on some 3,000 sample texts of roughly 500… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- A Crisis of AgencyBack in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as “the Inversion.” Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone’s grasp on the very reality of online experience. “What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t ‘truth,’ but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be,” Read wrote.Today, “the Inversion” feels almost quaint. Autonomous AI agents roam the internet, answering emails, sending texts, and occasionally deleting the code repositories of entire companies. An endless library of chatbot-speak crowds out human-written words in every Google search. Bots are spinning up music and videos, conjuring bad poetry and prose, building websites, doing research, making transactions, writing plodding memos to your boss, solving geometry conjectures. Those AI outputs then ride the rails of an internet controlled by black-box algorithms. Computers talk to computers, producing information to train computers to sound more like humans or to better engage them. Humans type into the box, scroll, and wait.AI is driving people insane in all kinds of ways. Its overwhelming speed and existential stakes have given rise to generalized malaise and hostility directed at the industry, to say nothing of actual cases of AI psychosis. But a lot of this is subtler—a deepening of the bewildering, corrosive feeling Read previously described. Culturally, the flood of slop, AI influencers, fake accounts, and AI tools is blurring the lines of an already post-truth age. A specific paranoia is in the air, an abiding concern about being manipulated, suckered, influenced. Stealth marketing campaigns, mercenary armies of bots, and paid clippers have led anyone or anything that appears dubious to be deemed a potential “psyop.” Cheap imitations of expressions of human creativity are easier than ever to fake. Sentiment, perhaps even popularity, is easier to manipulate. On top of all this is the push into agentic AI—a future we’re told will consist of an internet crammed with bots performing human tasks.People who don’t feel empowered by all of this are unmoored. Across so many levels of culture, there’s a feeling of control slipping ever so slightly away. You, me, all of us, whether or not we enjoy or… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written By AIA few weeks ago, where I live in Johannesburg, a man ran a stop sign and crashed into my Subaru. At the scene he was frantic, unable to gather his thoughts. Half an hour later, I received a lengthy, perfectly grammatical text from him elegantly explaining how he perceived the crash had happened. For a repair quote, I wrote to a mechanic I know, a man who used to text me in curt phrases riddled with shorthand. I got a response using just the same voice as the man who’d crashed into me—the distinctive voice of AI.In surveys, people consistently say they distrust AI-generated writing. But that hasn’t stopped more and more of us from using it in everyday life—to compose work emails and personal texts, to make shopping lists, even to write scripts for arguments with our spouses. “I feel like I’m going nuts,” the writer Jason Koebler complained in the tech outlet 404 Media, under “the cognitive load” of trying to discern whether every piece of text he reads is real or fake.AI writing is also creeping into our most elite literary spaces—newspapers’ opinion sections, books, literary magazines. I edit professionally, often working with authors renowned for their prose. Maybe two months ago, I began receiving a kind of submission I’d never gotten before: perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose. At first I was surprised that people who prided themselves on their writing would turn to AI to write for them. Even six months ago, when I occasionally identified a paragraph in a writer’s work that seemed AI-generated, they would apologize.Now some authors tell me they’ve embraced AI as a “writing tool,” no different from spell-check or a laptop. The phrase is protean and euphemistic, covering everything from using ChatGPT to find a quote to having it compose a long essay based on a two-sentence prompt. The reason for the change is simple: Competition in journalism and academia and grant writing and even YouTube influencing is insanely fierce. The edge goes to those who can stand out in a deluge of content, which is achieved through cleanly packaged messaging and sheer volume. Even professional communicators who are confident in their writing and unsure that AI is a perfect replacement are under increasing pressure to use it, so long as they feel… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- America Is Missing Out on the Ultimate Mosquito WeaponThe announcement of the new “air defense” system was issued from Changzhou. A company called Photon Matrix Lab claimed to have developed a new technology for identifying and eliminating deadly threats mid-flight. A video on Indiegogo showed potential buyers how it works: After detecting a mosquito, the device fires off what looks like a blue-violet lightning bolt. When struck, the insect does not just fall straight down, no—it is more satisfying than that: Its body somersaults and tumbles out of the frame, bringing its career of vampiric air raids to a sudden end.Photon Matrix Lab had my attention. Under normal circumstances, a mosquito lives for just a few weeks, and in that time, its wings will carry it a few miles or so, at most, from the pond or puddle of its birth—but for some reason, I am almost always within range of one. The bugs seem to have a primal knowledge of my whereabouts, and a craving for my blood that goes beyond mere thirst. In a span of minutes, they will perforate my skin 10 times with the dirty needles that protrude from their faces, and each micropuncture will swell up into an insomnia-inducing welt the size of a silver dollar.We are a secret society, those of us who attract this torment. When we meet one another at a barbecue, we bond over our shared longing for the mosquito’s extinction. On behalf of my fellow victims, I decided to look into this new laser to see whether it might really deliver us from misery. I reached out to Photon Matrix Lab to arrange a call.The mosquito-killing laser was not invented in China. It’s as American as the Model T or the Colt Revolver. Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who was the architect of President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile-defense system, first proposed the idea in 2006. He’d been invited to a brainstorm convened by Nathan Myhrvold, a polymath inventor. Myhrvold had served as chief technology officer at Microsoft before founding his own company, Intellectual Ventures, and had remained good friends with Bill Gates, who asked him to look into new technologies that might help prevent malaria.Myhrvold, now 66 and still the CEO of Intellectual Ventures, is jolly and excitable in conversation. On a video call, he told me that he was immediately drawn to the idea of developing the laser system that Wood had proposed. Myhrvold thought the weapon… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- The Latest Toys for Millennial-Parent GuiltBondu is a stuffed dinosaur that speaks 27 languages. It—or, more precisely, the AI chatbot embedded inside it—can also play games, help with homework, and patiently answer a child’s questions, even the really inane ones. Its “bedtime mode” includes breathing exercises and stories. Bondu, which costs $300 and comes in four colors, is marketed as a playmate, a confidant, a teacher, a quasi-caregiver. The ads take pains to talk up its safety controls, including an app that allows parents to review the conversations that Bondu is having with their child, as well as its ability to adapt to a child’s mood, interests, and age. And they emphasize, repeatedly, that the product is “screen-free.”This is an odd and technicality-laden argument to make about an object that contains the kind of computing power that would have basically been science fiction even a couple of decades ago—sort of like marketing a hand grenade as “bullet-free.” But Bondu knows its audience. What the toy is might be less important than what it isn’t. In one testimonial posted to Bondu’s website, a girl who looks to be about 4 years old chitchats about baby animals with her Bondu, whom she has named Rosie. The video cuts to a mom sitting cross-legged on the floor and smiling into a front-facing camera. “Camryn truly loves sharing about her day with her Bondu,” she says. “And I love that it’s something she can interact with that isn’t a screen.”Screen time can be a problem—the American Academy of Pediatrics says so; many early-childhood educators say so; well-meaning in-laws do too. Unfortunately, screen time also rocks, in that it is about the only way to occupy a child while you wash the dishes or have a little lie-down or go to work or do any of the other necessary or pleasurable activities life demands and invites. The one thing that feels more urgently worse than plopping a kid in front of the TV is the desperation that forces it. And then, later, the guilt.According to a survey conducted last year by Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, roughly half of the polled parents put screens in front of their kids daily, often because of issues securing or paying for child care. An even higher number—62 percent—felt guilty about their children’s screen time. In group chats and parent forums, parents admit to letting their kids watch Sesame Street in the kind of… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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